Intellectual inconsistency

One thing that really bothers me is sloppy thinking. The sort of sloppy thinking that got us into Iraq, is now being applied to Iran.

In Iraq the case more or less went; Saddam is evil, he’s got scary weapons, we should therefore invade, and the grateful Iraqis will set up a liberal democracy.

How’s that working out?

Anyway, a similar thread is being more or less propagated at the moment it goes: The Iranians are evil, they are trying to get nukes, this would be destabilising, we should stop them, military action is therefore justified.

This is of course utter nonsense and dangerous thinking. First, be careful when our leaders start branding someone as evil. It’s an attempt to paint themselves as the good guys, which is childish. Second, I more or less believed the anti-CND rhetoric of the cold war which said, “The West could be open to soviet nuclear blackmail, therefore we must have credible nuclear weaponry, as a deterrent to war”

So why doesn’t that apply to Iran/Israel?

The Israelis are allowed a submarine based nuclear deterrent. So even if the Iranians were able to produce enough weapons to totally destroy all of Israel (and thereby Palestine the land they are pledged to free, talk about your ultimate pyrrhic victory!), even if the were able to build good enough delivery systems, even if Israeli Patriot batteries didn’t get some of the nukes on the way in, it wouldn’t do the Iranians any good aggressively. Because the Israeli submarines could then just surface and destroy Iran.

But it would be a good defensive system, because if the Israelis attacked the Iranians with nukes, they would suffer huge damage in a counter-strike (assuming Iranian command and control could withstand a first strike).

I can’t see any circumstances in which the Iranians could actually use their weapons. The argument that the Iranians are dangerous fundamentalists who might supply nukes to terrorists is fantasy. Are we really supposed to believe a government would give al-qaida the means to incinerate London? Of course not. Such an action would result in your own certain incineration about ten minutes later, and no government wants that.

And there is the slight problem about what to do anyway. Ground invasion? You have to be kidding politically, we don’t have the troops and yes, let’s destabilise another oil supplier ‘cos there’s so much kicking around at present. Air strikes? If the Iranians have learned anything from the Israeli hit on Iraq in 1983, they have surely split production over many sites with built in redundancy, so that would be very hard, and anyway, bombing a sovereign country? Isn’t that the terrorism we are all supposed to be opposed to?

The ultimate irony of all this is the west (specifically the Americans) have the means to end this in about ten minutes. If they lift the embargo on advanced oil and gas extraction technology, the rationale for Iranian civil nuclear power disappears.

It wouldn’t be the macho solution, but it would be a solution.